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The Major Transitions in Evolution is a book written by John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry. At the time of its publication, Egbert Giles Leigh, Jr reviewing for Evolution commented that it "may be the most important book on evolution since R.A. Fisher's The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection".
Maynard Smith and Szathmary authored a review article in Nature.
Maynard Smith and Szathmáry identified several properties common to the transitions:
As stated by the authors, this book was aimed at professional biologists and assumes considerable prior knowledge. They have also published a summary of their arguments in Nature as well as a presentation of their ideas for a general readership under the title The Origins of Life — From the Birth of Life to the Origins of Language. Two decades later, Eörs Szathmáry published an "update" of his thesis in the original book, and this update involved demoting 'sex' from a major transition as well as promoting new transitions, such as the origins of plastids, to the list. The major transitions generally involve the formation of new levels of units of selection, consisting of ensembles of pre-existing entities. Therefore, the evolution of the major transitions can also be seen as the framework for studying the evolution of the levels of complexity in biology.